From Encyclopaedia of the Arctic, Routledge (2005)
ZAGOSKIN, LAVRENTII ALEKSEEVICH: Russian explorer of Alaska in the 19th century. He discovered the mountain ridge between the Yukon Territory and the eastern coast of the Norton Bay, explored the Kotzebue Sound, studied the climate of Alaska, and published his meteorological data collected over this two year period. In 1848 Zagoskin retired from the Navy, and moved to the village of Ostrov, 20km outside of Moscow. Not content to retire from scientific endeavours, he planted a garden of apple trees and made daily meteorological observations studying the impact of climate on crop yield.
From Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fifteenth Edition (2007)
ZAHIR SHAH, MOHAMMAD: (b.1914) King of Afghanistan from 1933 to 1973, providing an era of stable government to his country. He undertook a number of economic development projects, including irrigation and highway construction, that were backed by foreign aid, largely from the United States and the Soviet Union. He was also able to maintain Afghanistan’s neutral position in international politics.
In a bloodless coup on July 17, 1973, Zahir Shah – who was in Italy undergoing medical treatment – was deposed. The leader of the coup, General Mohammad Daud Khan (the king’s brother-in-law), proclaimed Afghanistan a republic with himself as its president. Zahir Shah formally abdicated on Aug. 24, 1973, and remained in Italy, where he spent most of the next three decades. During that time his native home descended further and further into chaos in what came to be known as the Afghan War.
From Wikipedia (early October 2021)
ZUCKERBERG, MARK ELLIOT: (/ˈzʌkərbзːrɡ/; born May 14, 1984) is an American media magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding Facebook, Inc. and serves as its chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.
Born in White Plains, New York, Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, where he launched the Facebook social networking service from his dormitory room on 4 February 2004, with college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Originally launched to select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users by 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. As of October 2021, Zuckerberg’s net worth is $122 billion, making him the 5th-richest person in the world. Since 2008, Time magazine has named Zuckerberg among the 100 most influential people in the world as a part of its Person of the Year award, which he was recognized with in 2010. In December 2016, Zuckerberg was ranked 10th on Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People.*
ŻYWIEC
But human decency prevents me from giving Zuckerberg the last word. Instead, the last word – because it is the last word to appear in the last printed edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 2010, the unwitting final stop (a conclusion even) of a journey lasting hundreds of years – is Żywiec, a town on the Sola River in south central Poland in the Carpathian Mountains near the Czech and Slovak borders. The town was first chronicled in the fourteenth century, and is a popular tourist centre, being home to a church containing the ‘Dormant Virgin’. It is also known for its large breweries and the estimated population in 1982 was 28,800.
Żywiec exists on Wikipedia too, where it gets more than the fourteen lines devoted to it in Britannica. Many thousands of useful words more. By the end of June 2019 its population had grown to 31,194. There is a history of its churches, of its role in the first partition of Poland in 1772, and about its fate in the two world wars. There is geographic and demographic information, and one learns that although between 1975 and 1998 it was located within the Bielsko-Biała Voivodeship, it has since become part of the Silesian Voivodeship. There are men’s and women’s football teams in the town, and the main brewery is now owned by Heineken.
Wikipedia also has several colour photographs of Żywiec, and the one of the town hall ought to be in a Wes Anderson movie. Should you wish to corroborate the information or find out more there are sixteen references to sources and many hyperlinks. Notable people born or connected with Żywiec include the former IBO cruiserweight champion Tomasz Adamek, the Poland international footballer Tomasz Jodłowiec, and Tadeusz Wrona, a pilot who successfully performed a belly landing of a Boeing 767 during LOT Polish Airlines Flight 16 at the Chopin Airport in Warsaw on 1 November 2011, and so smoothly did he do it that none of the 231 passengers and crew hurt as much as a hair.
When I accessed this information on 7 October 2021, there was a blue box with white type above it:
Please don’t scroll past this.
This Thursday, for the 1st time recently, we humbly ask you to defend Wikipedia’s independence. 98% of our readers don’t give; they simply look the other way. If you are an exceptional reader who has already donated, we sincerely thank you. If you donate just £2, or whatever you can this Thursday, Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. Most people donate because Wikipedia is useful. If Wikipedia has given you £2 worth of knowledge this year, take a minute to donate.
Show the world that access to reliable, neutral information matters to you.
Thank you.
The pedant in me balked at the use of ‘1st’ for ‘first’, but I donated £12, the price of a set of Britannica at the end of the eighteenth century. I couldn’t think of anything that provided better value.
I hope this book has encouraged you to think twice about throwing out an old set of encyclopaedias, of whatever vintage, of whatever quality. I hope it may even encourage you to rescue a set from a charity shop, or AbeBooks or eBay.
But be quick, as I may beat you to it. In September 2021 I went back to eBay to look for a set of The Children’s Encyclopaedia, the volumes I had first taken off the shelves at school fifty years before. There were a lot of copies – blue bindings, brown bindings, single volumes and complete ten-volume sets. One complete set in readable condition from the 1930s requested an opening bid of £3.50, and after a week it had attracted no interest. So I paid the minimum, and almost triple that for postage, and a large parcel arrived in a battered box after five working days. I imagined it had been thrown into the back of a lorry the way one chucks large objects into skips at dumps.
The volumes were a little lighter than I remembered, but not much. How could my ten-year-old hands have handled such things? They smelt of, yes, school. A few images were instantly familiar: the opening plate showing a dapper young Shakespeare reading to a bored Anne Hathaway; a large gathering of the world’s children in national dress (‘Your Little Friends in Other Lands’), a depiction so well meaning and so wholly offensive – naked ‘Hottentots’, inscrutable Chinese – that to reprint it today would land you in scalding water.